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Talk:Promaxima
Chosen Time Length Just a question, why did Sbiis Saibian decide to use that particular amount of time? Ace45954 03:29, April 1, 2010 (UTC) I chose the time of 500 quadrillion years arbitrarily as a possible upperbound on the maximum age of the universe, mainly because I had nothing to base such an estimate on. Later I learned that scientists had theorized that the half life of a proton might be as high as 10^32 years (A time frame much much greater than my supposed maximum age of the universe. Clearly the universe must live longer than any of it's constituent parts). This means that every 10^32 years a single proton has a 50:50 chance of winking out of existence. Assuming this is true the entire universe will eventually vanish given enough time, even if the big crunch never happens (according to the lastest scientific data the universe is not decelerating in it's expansion, but accelerating. This means some outward force must already be overpowering gravity. Assuming this force is as fundamental and eternal as gravitation we can say that the universe will never collapse but will continue to expand at an ever faster and faster rate forever). This "vanishing point" seemed to be a good way to put a cap on the age of the universe, so I calculated it based on the half-life and the number of particles in the universe. Originally I had used a static universe to calculate the number of parallel universes, but when I went back to redo the calculations I factored in an expansion rate, further increasing the result. In the end I went from my previous estimate of 10^(10^245) parallel universes to 10^(10^343). This is much much larger. I also find it fascinating how it is much greater than a googolplex, meaning the googolplex is not quite so "out there" as people seem to think. It still falls within some kind of "practical" measurement of the universe. I should note that I'm not the first person to try to compute the number of parallel universes. Robert Munafo and others have also made estimates before me, but what is interesting is they generally fall within the same ball park of "hyper exponential numbers". Those are numbers with an exponential number of digits. However I was the first to coin the term "Promaxima" for the theoretical number of parallel universes. The largest number related to physics however seems to be Don Pages number of approximately 10^(10^(10^(10^12))). I hope that helps answer your question. Sincerely, Sbiis Saibian Thanks!Ace45954 01:52, December 23, 2010 (UTC) Interesting how numbers arising in physics tend to stay in or below the small power tower range, like \(10^{10^{10^{10}}}\). What about numbers like \(10 \uparrow\uparrow 39\)? Will a physical constant ever need to reach that level? This begs a philosophical question: Does googological recursion (i.e. taking a function, iterating it, then iterating that function, then iterating that function, then iterating the number of levels of iteration, ...) have any scientific applications? FB100Z • talk • 16:32, January 11, 2013 (UTC)